ADEN — U.S. drone strikes killed eight al-Qaeda militants gathered in a house in southern Yemen, tribal sources said Thursday, amid reports a Saudi mole had infiltrated the network and supplied information to the CIA.

The strikes took place around midnight (2100 GMT Wednesday) in the town of Jaar, an al-Qaeda stronghold in Abyan province, a source in the town said.

“We heard three explosions rock the town,” the source said, adding that a “US drone” carried out the strikes on a residence where the jihadists had been meeting in the dead of night.

“Eight militants were killed and their bodies were left in pieces,” the source told AFP as witnesses said parts of the two-storey building were completely destroyed.

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No other houses were affected in what appeared to be surgical strikes based on precise information.
Another tribal source said that among the militants killed was one going by the name of “Jallad,” who had been in charge of armaments for al-Qaeda’s fighters in Yemen.

The latest air strikes came after Yemeni al-Qaeda leader Fahd al-Quso, who was wanted in connection with the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, was killed in an air strike in eastern Yemen on Sunday.

Quso’s name figured on an FBI list of most wanted terrorists, along with a reward of up to $5-million for information leading to his arrest.

U.S. media reported that a Saudi spy, reportedly a “mole” or “double agent,” spent weeks with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and garnered sensitive information that allowed the CIA to launch the drone strike against Quso.

The reports said that the “mole” had been ordered by AQAP to blow up a US-bound airliner.

A senior U.S. official told the New York Times that the bomb for the would-be Al-Qaeda attack was sewn into “custom fit” underwear that would have been difficult to detect even in a pat-down at an airport.

ABC News reported that the latest plot by AQAP was thwarted by a spy who infiltrated the group and took the explosive to Saudi Arabia.

Several military officials in Sanaa told AFP that this week’s air strikes were launched by US aircraft and coordinated by Yemen President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi, as well as by military and intelligence leaders.

On April 22, the financier of Yemen’s al-Qaeda branch — Mohammed Said al-Omda, also known as Abu Gharib Taizi — was killed in an air strike which witnesses said was carried out by a U.S. drone in the northeast of the country.

Omda was considered AQAP’s number four.

A week before that, another air strike which a security official said was conducted by a US drone targeted a moving vehicle carrying Al-Qaeda operatives in the province of Bayda, some 210 kilometres (130 miles) southeast of the capital Sanaa, killing three leaders.

Among them was a local AQAP leader, Abu Hamza al-Sabri, referred to as the “Emir (prince) of Bayda.”
Tribal sources in areas under Al-Qaeda control said on Thursday that AQAP has been heavily infiltrated by intelligence agents from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and even the United States.

The infiltration had occurred because AQAP has been randomly recruiting hundreds of unemployed youths over the past few months, they told AFP.

In February, witnesses said that AQAP executed two of its members accused of planting tracking devices in the vehicles of fellow militants and of providing Yemeni authorities, and the Saudi and US intelligence services, with information.

They were publicly shot dead in front of dozens of residents after the accusations against them were read out, the witnesses said.

Al-Qaeda is still holding around 30 of its militants accused of spying in the towns of Azzan in Shabwa province as well as Jaar, tribal sources say.

The jihadists, who have named themselves the Partisans of Sharia (Islamic law), control parts of southern and eastern Yemen where Sanaa’s authority is weak.

Hadi, who succeeded veteran leader Ali Abdullah Saleh after he stepped down following a year of protests, has vowed since his election in February to intensify the war against Al-Qaeda.

“The war against terrorists has not started yet, and will not be over before we purge every province and village so that the displaced can return home peacefully,” Hadi warned last week.

SANAA — As Yemen struggles to shake off ex-President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s legacy, the United States has intensified drone strikes on al Qaeda-linked militants, although some Yemeni officials fear this may only fuel instability.

This week alone, U.S. officials said they had seized a bomb that was to have been used by Yemen-based militants to attack an airliner, two al Qaeda men were killed in an apparently related drone strike, and Islamist fighters killed at least 32 Yemeni soldiers when they assaulted an army post in the south.

Saleh’s former deputy, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who replaced him as president under an internationally-backed, but still shaky, political transition deal, faces a tough dilemma.

He must meet the challenge from emboldened Islamist militants who have exploited more than a year of mayhem to seize and hold towns for the first time, and cannot afford to alienate the United States, one of Yemen’s main allies, as it combats what it views as al Qaeda’s potentially deadliest wing.

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Yet U.S. drone attacks, which have often killed civilians in the past, are resented by Yemenis, even the many who abhor al Qaeda. Suspicions that feuding generals and politicians, from Saleh down, are not averse to using the militants to advance their own ends also complicate efforts to combat them.

The violence has spiralled since Hadi took power in February vowing to fight al Qaeda’s foothold in Yemen, a desperately poor, water-stressed country mired in multiple conflicts exacerbated by decades of corruption and misrule.

“The real war against al Qaeda has yet to begin and it will not succeed until we eradicate the militants from every town,” Hadi said on Saturday. “Terrorist groups should surrender their weapons and relinquish ideology that counters Islamic virtue.”

Ethan Miller/AFP/Getty ImagesAn MQ-9 Reaper drone.

The al Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia group said Monday’s storming of an army position was their retort to Hadi’s remarks.

A U.S. official familiar with counter-terrorism activities in Yemen said drone strikes and other operations had increased after the turmoil of Saleh’s final months in office – when internal strife distracted Yemeni security forces and cooperation with a once-valued ally disintegrated.

“We pulled back on targeting for a while but (U.S. operations) have got some new momentum now,” the official said, adding that it had also become easier to get personnel and equipment into Yemen for the covert struggle against al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda has long bedevilled Yemen and its neighbour Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, but last year’s anti-Saleh uprising emboldened militants to rout demoralised, ill-equipped army units and grab whole swathes of southern provinces.

Washington’s alarm has grown in recent weeks as militants killed more than 200 Yemeni soldiers and captured dozens more in a series of spectacular attacks in Shabwa and Abyan provinces, where it now controls the cities of Zinjibar, Jaar, Shaqra and Azzan and has turned them into “Islamic emirates”.

GOVERNMENT MISGIVINGS

But some Yemeni officials fret that more U.S. missile strikes will backfire, increasing hostility to a central government that risks being seen as a tool of Washington.

A senior Defence Ministry official, who asked not to be named, said the government feared what he called a “free-for-all” drone programme like the one in Pakistan and had insisted on “tough limitations” to ensure that joint U.S.-Yemeni efforts remain firmly in the hands of the Yemeni authorities.

“The Yemeni armed forces remain the sole determinant of all military operations within its borders. We have the final word on all proposed air strikes, regardless of U.S. intelligence. No strikes will take place without our prior consent,” he said.

Yemenis still recall a 2009 U.S. cruise missile attack that killed dozens of people, including 14 women and 21 children.

Last year, with the anti-Saleh revolt in full swing, a drone strike killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Yemeni cleric and English-language al Qaeda propagandist said to have inspired several attacks on targets in the United States.

Hadi, who discussed the fight against al Qaeda with FBI chief Robert Mueller in Sanaa last month, has offered repeated assurances to Washington about military cooperation.

But U.S. strikes and the fractured Yemeni military have failed to quell a burgeoning Islamist insurgency in the south that is sapping Yemen’s efforts to build a new political order.

Rick Wilking / Reuters filesOfficials say the informant was working for the CIA and Saudi Arabian intelligence when he was given the bomb, which he was to smuggle on to an airliner. He then turned the device over to authorities.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which includes Saudi militants who fled to Yemen after the kingdom crushed a violent home-grown 2003-2006 campaign, is riding high.

Its Ansar al-Sharia ally has gone on the offensive in the south in the last two months, storming military bases, plundering ammunition depots, carving out new strongholds and sending teams to launch attacks elsewhere.

On May 1 two Yemenis were killed and a Frenchman was wounded when suspected al Qaeda gunmen ambushed a vehicle carrying employees of France’s TOTAL in an eastern province. Militants blew up TOTAL’s gas pipeline the week before, in the third attack on oil and gas facilities in the past month.

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RANSOM DEMAND

Militants are also kidnapping foreigners for ransom.

A Swiss woman, one of two foreign aid workers seized near Hodeidah, hundreds of miles from al Qaeda’s southern lairs, is now held in Shabwa province in the south by al Qaeda militants demanding $60 million for her release, Western diplomats say.

“For the first time al Qaeda controls territory,” said one diplomat. “As the United States sees it, unless they are kept on the run, it will only be a matter of time before al Qaeda launches another attack on the West.”

Yet global jihad is not the main public concern of Ansar al-Sharia, which has set up de facto administrations in captured towns, providing security and basic services to a region that has long bristled at official neglect and discrimination.

Recent videos published by the group on YouTube show its members in Jaar, renamed “the emirate of Waqar”, handing out sacks of grain, rigging up electricity lines and dealing out justice in a makeshift sharia Islamic court.

“When did you last have electricity?” one fighter asks an old man sat on a rock as his compatriots assemble a pylon behind him. “We’ve never had electricity,” replies the man in disdain.

Ansar al-Sharia has let the Red Cross implement water projects and provide health care to the internally displaced.

But the militants sometimes meet local resistance, as in the town of Lawdar, where residents using arms abandoned by a fleeing army brigade held off a three-day assault this month.

“They (Ansar al-Sharia) arrived after the dawn prayer, they thought it would be easy to take the town, that we would surrender like they did in Zinjibar,” said Saeed al-Dhailie, who heads a local committee set up last year during the protests.

“We fought them off with Duskas (Soviet-era heavy machineguns) and rifles. Thousands of youth participated, tribesmen from the surrounding area joined us,” Dhailie said.

DRONE LIMITATIONS

Yemeni generals argue that a properly equipped and well-trained standing army, not more aerial bombardments by foreigners, represents the best way of uprooting the insurgents.

“After a year of fighting al Qaeda with outdated Soviet weaponry we welcomed the arrival of U.S. drones to support us in our battle,” said Brigadier General Mohammed al-Sawmli, whose Brigade 25 was pinned down for months by Islamic militants last year after Yemeni security forces abandoned Abyan province.

“They can be an effective means of targeting extremely dangerous militants in remote unpopulated areas. But in the end drones cannot win this fight without the Yemeni armed forces,” he told Reuters.
Yemeni officials and Western diplomats agree that restructuring the armed forces, one objective of the transition deal, is paramount to winning the fight against extremism.

But reforming the military cuts to the heart of a tense standoff between relatives of Saleh still in senior military and security positions and opponents determined to oust them.

The United States has not openly endorsed the wholesale removal of Saleh relatives, some of whom command elite units funded by Washington for years, prompting some Yemeni suspicions that it still sees them as allies in its fight with al Qaeda.

“Anti-American sentiment is on the rise. Not just in the villages which are being bombarded, but across the entire country, in the cities, in the universities too,” said Abdullah al-Faqih, politics professor at Sanaa University.

“People feel as though their country’s sovereignty is being violated, that their new president’s government is nothing but a board of directors governed by the Americans.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/after-underwear-bomb-foiled-u-s-drone-attacks-in-yemen-scrutinized/feed/1stdA pro-government tribesman and army soldiers are seen at a mountain military position near the southern Yemeni city of Lawdar, in this May 6, 2012 file photo.An MQ-9 Reaper drone.Officials say the informant was working for the CIA and Saudi Arabian intelligence when he was given the bomb, which he was to smuggle on to an airliner. He then turned the device over to authorities.Underwear bombers.Second U.S. drone strike in Pakistan in two days kills five, including militant commanderhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/second-u-s-drone-strike-in-pakistan-in-two-days-kills-five-including-militant-commander
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/second-u-s-drone-strike-in-pakistan-in-two-days-kills-five-including-militant-commander#commentsThu, 09 Feb 2012 13:07:01 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=138951

By Jibran Ahmad

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — The second U.S. drone attack in two days in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region killed five people on Thursday, including a senior militant commander with links to al Qaeda, Pakistani intelligence officials and Taliban sources said.

Badar Mansoor, leader of a faction of the Pakistani Taliban with close ties to al Qaeda, was one of the five killed in the strike in Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, near the Afghan border, intelligence officials and Pakistani Taliban sources said.

“Badar Mansoor was living in a rented house here. He died in the drone strike this morning, and we have confirmation of five deaths,” a Pakistani intelligence official told Reuters.

Officials said the death toll could rise because buildings next to the one targeted were also damaged and people could have been there.

On Wednesday, a U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles at a compound in a village near Miranshah killing 10 suspected militants, Pakistani officials and villagers said.

The Central Intelligence Agency’s drone program, a key element of the U.S. counter-terrorism strategy in the region, was apparently halted after a November NATO cross-border air attack killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, sparking fury in Pakistan.

The attacks with the unmanned aircraft in Pakistan’s unruly northwestern ethnic Pashtun areas along the Afghan border were resumed on January 10.

Several militant groups, including the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda, operate in Pakistan’s semi-autonomous border regions, taking advantage of a porous border with Afghanistan to conduct cross-border attacks, or plot violence elsewhere.

North Waziristan is also an important base for the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network, an Afghan militant faction allied with the Taliban, which the United States says is one of its deadliest adversaries in Afghanistan.

While the Haqqanis say they no longer need havens in North Waziristan and stay in Afghanistan, they are known to still maintain a presence in the Pakistani border region.

The use of the remotely piloted aircraft over Pakistan is opposed by most Pakistani politicians and the public, who consider drone strikes violations of sovereignty with unacceptable civilian casualties.

But despite public opposition, Pakistan has quietly supported the program, which President Barack Obama ramped up after taking office in 2009.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/second-u-s-drone-strike-in-pakistan-in-two-days-kills-five-including-militant-commander/feed/2stdA Pakistani protester holds a burning US flag as they shout slogans during a protest in Multan on February 9, 2012 against the US drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal region. US missiles killed Al-Qaeda's chief in Pakistan, one of the Americans' main targets in the volatile country and wanted for attacks that killed scores of people, officials said. Badar Mansoor, who reputedly sent fighters to Afghanistan and ran a training camp in North Waziristan, was killed in a drone strike near the Afghan border, Pakistani officials and a member of his group told AFP.U.S. drone strike kills six militants in North Waziristan region of Pakistanhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/u-s-drone-strike-kills-six-militants-in-north-waziristan-region-of-pakistan
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/u-s-drone-strike-kills-six-militants-in-north-waziristan-region-of-pakistan#commentsThu, 12 Jan 2012 14:56:48 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=128578

By Haji Mujtaba

MIRANSHAH, Pakistan — A second drone strike in two days killed six militants in North Waziristan in northwest Pakistan near the Afghan border on Thursday, intelligence officials said, further marking the resumption of the U.S. campaign paused for almost two months.

The suspected U.S. drone fired two missiles at two cars in the Dogga area of North Waziristan tribal region, killing six.

“The missiles hit two cars that were heading towards the border. Several foreigners were in the cars, but we have no information on their nationalities yet,” an intelligence source told Reuters. The source said there might be more casualties.

The strike comes two days after a similar attack killed four militants in North Waziristan, marking the resumption of the unacknowledged U.S. drone campaign, paused after a Nov. 26 NATO cross-border attack killed 24 Pakistani troops. The last drone strike before Tuesday’s was on Nov. 17.

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Such attacks have been used increasingly in recent years in the fight against insurgents in Pakistan’s largely lawless Pashtun tribal areas in the west and northwest who fuel violence across the border in Afghanistan.

Drones armed with missiles have played a significant role in U.S. counter-terrorism operations as the Obama administration winds down the war in Afghanistan and Washington’s focus expands to militant havens in countries including Pakistan.

The Obama administration contends that drone strikes have helped weaken the central leadership of al Qaeda and put associated militant groups on the defensive. Others say the lull since mid-November allowed militants to regroup.

U.S. officials denied the drop-off in attacks was part of a deliberate moratorium on such flights linked to the political and diplomatic uproar over the November air strike.

Officials maintained that strikes were based on the availability of targeting intelligence and suggested that such intelligence had been in short supply recently.